https://mashable.com/article/study-ai-slop-youtube
If it feels like there's a lot of AI slop on YouTube, that's because there's a lot of AI slop on YouTube.
New research from video-editing company Kapwing, reported by the Guardian found that more than one in every five videos that the YouTube Shorts algorithm shows new users is low-quality, AI-generated content.
One of the most interesting parts of the Kapwing study is that of the first 500 YouTube Shorts videos in a brand-new, untouched YouTube Shorts algorithm, 104 were AI-generated and 165 were brainrot — a whopping 21 percent and 33 percent, respectfully.
Of course, the love of AI slop differs depending on the country. Kapwing found that AI slop channels in Spain have a combined 20.22 million subscribers, more than any other country, but has fewer AI slop channels among its top 100 channels than other countries. The U.S. has nine channels among its top 100 channels, and the third-most slop subscribers at 14.47 million.
YouTube isn't the only social media beast whose content is falling to the depths of AI slop despair, but the Kapwing study makes it clear that AI slop isn't going anywhere. As Mashable's Tim Marcin reported earlier this month, AI slop is taking over our feeds, from fake animals on surveillance tapes to heavy machinery cleaning barnacles off whales.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Deep Blue on Thursday January 01, @11:29AM
This game has been lost.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Thursday January 01, @11:49AM (4 children)
As long as eyeballs consume them, and look at the ads or whatnot. I guess nothing will change.
But if they don't watch them. This slop is just a massive drain on YouTube and others finances. They used some AI to create it, that cost money or electricity and storage, then it was sent to youtube or similar and then it sets there draining resources.
One would think that Youtube etc would mind all this slop that generates so little or nothing for them. If this is a quarter or a third or all their content. It would add up for them if they started to actively purged this slop. Clean the drain so to speak.
That is unless people watch it ...
(Score: 3, Funny) by RamiK on Thursday January 01, @12:14PM
I watch a lot of AI covers (metal... dark wave... soul...) and going by the copy-pasted comments and emojis, most of the viewers are bots or click farm workers.
compiling...
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Thursday January 01, @03:33PM
The economics of it are very weird. There was a recent discussion on the mongolian basket weaving forum of an AI generated channel that uploaded a could hundred megs/day of AI generated attractive women and peaked around 6TB of upload before being deleted. It never made it to the monetization threshold, maybe a hundred total views across the entire channel. Eventually the channel was deleted by YT but for a while YT spent a ton of money storing and processing and searching and promoting 6 TB of slop.
I suspect that there's a bit of a pyramid going on where the early adopter cost of AI is subsidized by the venture capitalists on the theory that businesses will sign up for $2500/month plans "after demand is generated". Even with local AI models the sheer cost of electricity or depreciation on the graphics cards must exceed the revenue of approximately zero.
Note that for propaganda purposes the economics don't matter because its externally funded. Even just generally discrediting the platform in favor of centrally controlled highly censored legacy media is financially viable. Possibly the anons who claimed it all came from Eglin AFB were correct after all.
Its also an interesting extortion/DDOS cybercrime vector. Pay us 0.001 BTC every day or we'll flood your platform with 6000000 TB of slop per day from our botfarm, whats cheaper paying or filtering the slop after paying for the BW and storage?
Also I suspect its a fine line between AI Slop and genuine niche content. Me doing unboxing videos of unwrapping Kraft cheese-food-product slices on camera would probably be accepted as real although bizarre and useless; a very attractive woman doing that might be accused of being AI slop?
I suspect the army of mentally ill "work for free" deletionists on Wikipedia will soon be harvested to work for free on Youtube, deleting channels of anything they don't personally like or feel they can successfully bully, some fraction of which might be AI slop.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by aafcac on Thursday January 01, @10:16PM
Yes, so I try not to click at all, and if I do I have the channel added to the do not recommend channel list. It has made a d difference, but over time it's gotten harder to tell.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday January 02, @03:21AM
It's been obvious to me for a while that the "subscribers" and "views" on the various slop channels (clips, AI, and the like) are also bots, with the obvious goal of sucking unearned payment out of YT. Here's a pretty consistent clue: a million subs, a million views in the first 24 hours, ads every 30 seconds (not always an exaggeration), and 35 comments.
On real channels, comments tend to run somewhere around 2% of views.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by AlwaysNever on Thursday January 01, @02:38PM (1 child)
and only watch videos where the creator himself appears in them. Those will also contain AI, but less so.
(Score: 4, Informative) by RamiK on Thursday January 01, @07:17PM
https://github.com/gijsdev/ublock-hide-yt-shorts [github.com]
compiling...
(Score: 3, Funny) by SomeGuy on Thursday January 01, @03:32PM (4 children)
I haven't messed with youtube in ages. It's been trash for a long time now. I remember when "youtube poop" was just gibberish clips from Sonic, or similar.
Videos come up when I am web searching for various information, like how to repair something, and it wants me to sit through a one hour long video, that should have been a web page where I could skim or CTRL-F for specific terms, probably doesn't even have the specific details I need, and now forces me to sit through advertising first. Fuck that.
Then look at the list of related videos... they almost all describe themselves as "OMG! THIS IS SO SHOCKING! YOU ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO SEE THIS! GASP! GASP! OMG! WTF! GASP!" AI slop or not - Fuck that shit. What the heck, people?
Time to dig a hole and bury it.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Thursday January 01, @03:53PM (1 child)
I had a suspicion what the results would be so I did an experiment and was proven accurate. Two data points don't prove a lot but its still an interesting perspective to think about:
1) Task that nobody really enjoys and certainly isn't a hobby. "How to install toilet tank fill valve". I have recently done this IRL and it was utterly uneventful and uninteresting and I used a PDF of the instructions online although other than picking up a couple pointers I didn't get much out of the instructions. The videos all like 2 to 10 minutes of a dude replacing a toilet tank fill valve. That seems "fair" as it takes about that long IRL to do it. Unless something goes wrong (and in automotive and plumbing, something often seems to go wrong) it takes longer to gather tools and cleanup and put all the tools away than to do the work. You'll need a big sponge and a bucket and the old valves "finger tight" nuts will probably need a wrench to remove even if the new ones are properly installed "finger tight" etc. No women in bikinis (or less) doing the work, no charismatic entertainers, some corpo slop but the corpo slop was surprisingly on topic and pretty good although you'll have to look at a flowmaster or home depot logo on the screen ...
2) Task that some people consider a hobby. "how to make a birdhouse". ohshit.jpg here comes the tidal wave of slop, like a septic tank asploded. There ARE some legit 2 to 5 minute videos about not hitting your thumb with the hammer and don't stick your hand in the table saw, etc. But here comes the slop: 30 minute videos of some guy trying too hard to be overly charismatic, "build for only $3" yeah LOL if your scrap pile is large enough literally everything is free, then here somes the "products that sell" videos about becoming a millionaire by making etsy birdhouses in this short 1 hour video. Shockingly I expected videos of stuff like "45 minutes of hot girl hand sanding a birdhouse in her new itty bitty thong" which I would only watch for strictly research purposes. "Build a bird house in minecraft" in 22 seconds was actually a pretty good short video, I've come to expect YT shorts to be total slop but this was possibly the first good one I've ever seen, like, ever.
But yeah in summary for non-hobby non-host non-hostess videos YT is shockingly pretty good. For hobby or overly charismatic male host or hot wildly underdressed female hosts, YT is pretty much dead at this point (unless that was what you wanted as opposed to the hobby content itself)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Thursday January 01, @06:08PM
It's not uncommon for parts manufacturers for stuff like plumbing and appliances to put out videos on how to use their replacement parts correctly. Many of them are on YouTube because it's cheaper for the manufacturer to let YouTube handle the cost of actually serving up the video. Are they as good as having an in-person human teaching you how to do it? No, because these demo videos are trying to be polished and won't give you the 30-years-in-the-field of what to watch out for. But they're still very useful.
It's the kind of thing the Internet was supposed to be useful for, really.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01, @10:09PM (1 child)
Meanwhile, you have the media press claiming Ewe Toob is the future of media.
WTF is going on?
(Score: 1) by anubi on Friday January 02, @01:59AM
Look at media today.
And the paradigm that newer technology is somehow better.
As far as I see, YouTube is right in sync with the rest of media quality.
Most of it needs to be flushed.
The saving grace is I am not compelled to tolerate it.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jelizondo on Friday January 02, @02:56AM (3 children)
Contrary to what most comments say, I watch stuff in YT almost every day. Good quality, good content. Some have "sponsor messages" embedded and I don't mind it, creators need to make money. (Yes I pay the Premium package.)
Once in a blue Moon I get some AI-generated shit; just recently a supposed documentary about a genius Mexican mechanic that used the original VW Beetle engine as a base for race cars and even airplanes. I thought I would have heard of such a guy given that I raced (amateur) quarter mile and two friends of mine were professional races drivers, my father was an airplane pilot and other connections to the world of racing / aviation and engines. Digging around I found that the story was entirely made up and generated by AI. But that was an exception.
Channels I watch, in no particular order: World Science Festival, Religion for Breakfast, Veritasium, Words Unravelled, DW Documentary, Let's talk religion, Malcolm Gladwell (Revisionist History), Star Talk, among others. I gives me a couple of hours per night of good content based on Science and Academic studies.
Maybe you have trained the algorithm to give you garbage?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Reziac on Friday January 02, @03:33AM (2 children)
I have approximately the same experience. I don't watch any "personality" channels, and have become adept at avoiding slop, but I do watch a wide variety of other stuff, with about a thousand subs (some overlap with yours), and most of what YT suggests at me is somewhere off in the established directions. Today out of the blue it spit up a bunch of Irving Finkel interviews I hadn't seen.
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OT: what's with all the server errors today? Anything I do, I get either "Document Moved Here" or "500 Internal error" before it proceeds to whatever I was trying to do here.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by jelizondo on Friday January 02, @05:05AM (1 child)
Sorry about the server errors. The software is very old and finicky, sometimes it just decides to take a vacation. The tech staff is dealing with it, but as usual, we are understaffed and overworked. 😢
Just give us some time, thing will get back to normal. (I truly hope!)
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday January 02, @06:37AM
Funny thing, no sooner did I get done complaining about it, than the errors went away. You guys are freakin' awesome.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.